Six people were found dead Sunday afternoon in a boxcar in Laredo, Texas, a spokesperson for the Laredo Police Department said.

At approximately 3 p.m. local time, an employee for Union Pacific who was responsible for loading and unloading train cars at a rail yard before they headed north reported the discovery of the bodies, said the spokesperson, Investigator Joe E. Baeza.

The circumstances of their deaths were unknown, he said, adding that police were investigating. The identities of the people were not known Sunday.

“Union Pacific is saddened by this incident and is working closely with law enforcement to investigate,” Daryl Bjoraas, a spokesperson for Union Pacific, said in a statement.

The city of Laredo is on the U.S.-Mexico border, about 160 miles southwest of San Antonio.

In the last decade, there have been several incidents where people have been found dead in train cars or trucks in or near U.S. border cities. Many of those victims were migrants, who were unaware that temperatures exponentially rise inside those kinds of containers.

High temperatures in Laredo were more than 90 degrees Sunday.

Officials could not confirm if those who died were migrants trying to cross into the United States.

In 2022, 53 migrants — 47 adults and six children — were found in a tractor-trailer on the outskirts of San Antonio in what was one of the deadliest migrant smuggling cases in U.S. history.

A year later, the bodies of two people believed to be migrants, along with five others who were in critical condition, were found inside a shipping container on a train in Uvalde County, Texas.

Border Patrol agents in Laredo rescued 23 migrants stowed in a locked train compartment in 2024 as temperatures neared 100 degrees, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. None of the migrants reported any injuries.

Overall, the number of border crossings has declined significantly in the second Trump administration amid his deportation drive.

Through March of this year, U.S. Customs and Border Protection has encountered more than 63,000 people at the U.S.-Mexico border. There were more than 440,000 in all of last year.

The term “encounters,” according to the agency, encompasses a broad range of circumstances but it includes those who are apprehended as well as those who seek lawful admission but are turned away.

In each of the last two years of the Biden administration, there were more than 2 million encounters, according to data from the agency.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Christina Morales/Gabriel V. Cárdenas
c. 2026 The New York Times Company